Film Commentary by Alex Good

Children of the Damned (1964)

*. Sequels often disappoint by being just a rehash of the original. Producers can’t be blamed for that, since what audiences usually want is more of the same. It’s a bold move to break with a successful formula.
*. So I’ll give Children of the Damned credit, a lot of credit even, for trying to do something different. This isn’t Village of the Damned 2: The New Batch. Unfortunately, that just makes me feel even more disappointed at how bad it is.
*. The storylines in the two films are so different that it’s sometimes said that this isn’t a sequel. To some extent I agree, but the children are still supernatural offspring (virgin births), still have the same powers (mind reading and mind control, a shared group consciousness), and they did make use of the “Damned” again in the title, so a sequel of sorts it is.
*. I assume they’re the same alien hybrids as in the first movie, though even in Village of the Damned the business of their mothers’ impregnation was left murky, for obvious reasons, and we never really knew who their daddy was. In this film it’s often said that the explanation offered of a sudden evolutionary jump through parthenogenesis means that there is no alien impregnation, but accelerated evolution, a “biological sport,” is just presented as a hypothesis and wouldn’t rule out an alien breeding program anyway.
*. On the DVD commentary track writer John Briley says he thought of the film as essentially “a moral fable about the Cold War” and not a psychological thriller. That seems right to me. The basic idea is that the children represent the best and the brightest of the scientific community being co-opted by the military-industrial complex to create more advanced weapons system. Given what they’re able to put together in the church out of scraps and spare parts one can see the potential.
*. So basically this is an anti-war movie piggy-backing on the premise from Village of the Damned. Even the end is meant to make a point about how easy it would be to accidentally turn a cold war hot. And I credit Briley (who would later win an Academy Award for writing Gandhi) for his political stand. But at the end of the day I don’t think it works.
*. I don’t know if it’s possible to make such a movie without seeming preachy. Children of the Damned is preachy, and was apparently meant to be even preachier. The kids even hole up in a church for heaven’s sake!

*. Briley also wrote a creepy little movie called The Medusa Touch that, when you think about it, is very similar to Children of the Damned. I hadn’t thought about the connection until I found out he wrote The Medusa Touch when researching these notes. (Yes, I do research. Not much, but a bit.)
*. When Doctors Llewellyn and Neville go knocking on Paul’s door and they are greeted by the lovely Barbara Ferris (playing Paul’s aunt) she asks them if she can help them. A leering Doctor Neville chortles “Rather!”
*. This seemed a bit out of character but I didn’t think much of it. Then, listening to Briley’s commentary, I was surprised to hear him say that he had to work hard to keep the audience from thinking of the two doctors as homosexuals. To be honest, I had never thought of this. Then, re-watching it, I guess I could see where people might get that idea. They never seem to hook up with Ferris. On the other hand, they are shown as sleeping in separate bedrooms.
*. I wonder if Black Sabbath were inspired by this movie when they wrote the song “Children of the Grave.” That was released in 1971 and the lyrics talk about children rising up to protest against war. There are lines like “Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear? Can they win the fight for peace or will they disappear?” It’s not too much of a stretch to think there was some influence. I mean, they got the name of the band from the marquee outside a theatre playing Bava’s Black Sabbath.
*. Well, to sum up, it’s all quite earnest but I didn’t find it very interesting. I like the junior Anacharsis Cloots congress marching about London but they just don’t have the same edge that the cuckoos from the first film had. John Wyndham’s main theme about a competition between incompatible species never gets much of a hearing. These kids are the good guys, not damned at all but sent from above to redeem fallen humanity, and ending up much like that other fellow. This be the verse.